I contributed ! But what now ?

This talk will be about methods to improve contributor retention rates in your FOSS community.

For any FOSS community, newcomer onboarding is important but retaining them is critical. Since past one year, I have been working with the Fedora Community Operations team on community-oriented metrics and on improving contributor retention rates in Fedora. During this talk, I would like to share the findings from my work.

For any FOSS community, newcomer onboarding is important but retaining them is critical. Since past one year, I have been working with the Fedora Community Operations team on community-oriented metrics and on improving contributor retention rates in Fedora. During this talk, I would like to share the findings from my work.

This talk will discuss about the methods FOSS communities can adopt to improve contributor retention rates.
I will explain different community-oriented metrics we use at Fedora to understand community health like contributor engagement metrics, contributor onboarding and retention rates etc. I will then share some insights derived from finding common patterns in contribution activity of long-term active contributors i.e.
Are long-term active contributors involved in many different areas of their projects?
What are some good measures to predict longetivity of contributors ?
What is the magic element X that makes people stay ?
I will talk on how a community can apply the insights generated from these metrics to devise methods/guidelines to improve contributor retention rates and how an individual interested in contributing can ensure their prolonged interest in the FOSS project/organization.

In the end, I will also share my experience as a newcomer and contributor to Community Operations team of Fedora and have a brief QnA session about the steps FOSS communities apart from Fedora are taking to improve their contributor retention rates.